BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) provides train service throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
05/12/2025
How do you measure BART's impact on the Bay Area?
You might look at the numbers. In fiscal year 2024, for example, BART contributed an estimated $2.7 billion in economic activity to the five counties it serves. Another metric: Riders traveled over 750 million miles that same year* – that's nearly a billion miles traveled on our tracks!
But other impacts go beyond stats and figures: BART makes people’s lives easier, BART reduces traffic, BART helps the environment. Numbers don't tell the whole story.
So, where to begin? Let's start small.
To understand BART’s impact, we will start by looking at a single station – Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre. From this zoomed-in vantage point, we can illustrate how just one station transforms and sustains not just a neighborhood, but a broad community of residents, workers, businesses, travelers, and families.
Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre Station sits at the convergence of Highway 680, the Iron Horse pedestrian and bicycle trail, multiple hotels and office buildings, and a vibrant mixed-use transit village with restaurants, gyms, bars, a dance school, 600-plus apartment complex, the list goes on . The station is the beating heart that enables these resources to exist and prosper. BART stations are not simply destinations -- stops on a line to get you here and there.
BART stations create destinations.
We connected with local homeowners, small business owners, a commuter, a major hotel chain, restaurants, neighborhood hangouts, and an apartment complex to understand firsthand why BART is essential to their bottom lines and the well-being of their community.
View an interactive map of some of the businesses, places, and people that contribute to the neighborhood's economic and cultural vibrancy here:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/7145a4e031a04ea78410d84928212158
By looking at this single station – one of fifty – we begin to understand why public transportation is so crucial to the Bay Area. The impact of one station is immense; imagine the impact of all of BART’s 50 stations taken together! Public transportation facilitates economic growth and livable communities, and that equates to a booming region that will grow and flourish for generations to come.
“Locating by a BART station is a great move for businesses,” said BART Director Matt Rinn, whose district includes Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre Station. “You have in-built customers, who are coming and going from the station, you can increase capacity by not needing a parking lot, and your employees can get to work affordably.”
Rinn knows business. He opened his insurance agency in Pleasant Hill and was named the city's Businessperson of the Year in 2011. He learned the role transit plays in sustaining and building communities when he was elected to the Pleasant Hill City Council and became a board member on the Pleasant Hill Chamber of Commerce, for which he later served as Chairman of the Board.
“These experiences helped me understand and appreciate how vital transit is to our communities. It builds a vibe. BART has helped attract a demographic that wouldn’t necessarily settle in the suburbs – young families, people who work in tech – who can experience all the amenities of a suburban environment, including more housing options, but can easily commute into major urban centers for work,” Rinn said.
The new kid on the block in the Contra Costa Centre Transit Village is Headlands Brewing, the third East Bay outpost of the craft beer brewery.
The family-friendly beer garden, set amongst tall redwoods with fire pits and a kids’ play area, opened in March 2025. For the grand opening, Headlands offered $1 off your first pint when you showed your Clipper card.
Transit accessibility isn’t important just for Sharp’s customers, but his employees too. Headlands recently launched commuter benefits for its employees. All of Headlands’ locations are BARTable.
“A community is built by interacting in a positive way,” said Kristin Tennessen, whose family of five lives a short bike ride from Pleasant Hill/Contra Costa Centre Station. “Bicycling on the trail system here has made facilitating those connections easy.”
To get to work each morning, Tennessen and her husband ride their bikes along the Contra Costa Canal Trail to the station – it takes about eight minutes – lock their bikes up, and ride BART to their offices. They also regularly ride their bikes to BART with their kids, ages six, nine, and eleven, to take them on various adventures, like the Oakland Museum of California and the Exploratorium.
“People in their cars can’t stop and talk to each other like you can on a bike,” Tennessen said. “I run into people on the trail while I’m heading to BART, and we stop and chat. It facilitates interaction with your community.”
Click through the slides and read more here https://www.bart.gov/news/articles/2025/news20250512-0
